Dai and Singleton (2000) study a class of term structure models for interest rates that specify the instantaneous interest rate as an affine combination of the components of an N-dimensional affine diffusion process. Observable quantities of such models are invariant under regular affine...

Can the usage of a risky numeraire with a greater than risk free expected return reduce the capital requirements in a solvency test? I will show that this is not the case. In fact, under a reasonable technical condition, there exists no optimal numeraire which yields smaller capital requirements...

We extend the standard specification of the market price of risk for affine yield models of the term structure of interest rates, and estimate several models using the extended specification. For most models, the extended specification fits US data better than standard specifications, often with...

A constrained informationally efficient market is defined to be one whose price process arises as the outcome of some equilibrium where agents face restrictions on trade. This paper investigates the case of short sale constraints, a setting which despite its simplicity, generates new insights....

We develop a tractable partial equilibrium model to analyze the impact on the bond market generated by a ban on naked credit default swaps (CDS). We demonstrate that such a ban will have a negligible impact on the borrowing costs if CDS speculators are risk averse and take positions which are...

The classical reduced-form and filtration expansion framework in credit risk is extended to the case of multiple, non-ordered defaults, assuming that conditional densities of the default times exist. Intensities and pricing formulas are derived, revealing how information driven default contagion...

This paper develops a dynamic equilibrium model where agents exhibit a strong form of belief heterogeneity: they disagree about zero probability events. It is shown that, somewhat surprisingly, equilibrium exists in this setting, and that the disagreement about nullsets naturally leads to...

Discretely sampled variance and volatility swaps trade actively in OTC markets. To price these swaps, the continuously sampled approximation is often used to simplify the computations. The purpose of this paper is to study the conditions under which this approximation is valid. Our first set of...